ABSTRACT Core A The Administrative and Research Support Core of the Carolina Center for Population Aging and Health (CCPAH) has the overarching goals of fostering creative research and high-quality data collection, reducing the administrative and technical burdens on faculty of conducting that research, and managing the Center's activities so that the goals of the CCPAH are realized. This core will organize seminars and workshops related to the Center's themes, identify faculty new to UNC or whose work logically relates to our themes, streamline administrative processes so that faculty can focus on science, and manage the day to day operations of the center. The success of this Core, in combination with the success of the Center overall, will result in several outcomes. Most importantly, data collection projects undertaken by CCPAH faculty will better reflect the state of the art with respect to aging-related design and content and will be better integrated with one another and with other surveys that are major resources for aging. This outcome is central to our ambition of enhancing research on aging at CCPAH and elsewhere because the projects will place major new data sets in the public domain, which will be more useful to scholars of aging both within CCPAH and worldwide if their design incorporates cutting-edge approaches and supports comparisons to other data. The Core will leverage existing structures at the Carolina Population Center, CCPAH's administrative home, that work well, but also develop new activities to make sure that CCPAH accomplishes the work it has proposed over the coming five years. The combination of the CCPAH PI, Core Leaders, project manager, and CPC's experienced professional staff on which CCPAH will draw, all of whom are deeply committed to the goals we have developed, will provide strong leadership for CCPAH in the coming years.